sint maarten/saint martin

Our current island is an interesting one - Sint Maarten or Saint Martin depending where you are.

Fun fact for Austin - the southern part of the island is part of the Netherlands (Sint Maarten). The northern part of the island is part of France (Saint Martin). Even though they are governed by different countries there is no border patrol between the two, so you can go back and forth between the French side and the Dutch side.

This would be our longest sail (24+ hours). We left Guadeloupe just before 12:00 PM.

Going overnight means someone always has to be awake to keep an eye on things - the weather, the wind, other boats, etc. The girls were very excited about staying up and helping with the night watch. Neither one made it to midnight, and both slept through the entire night.

Cruise ships are crazy looking at night. You can see them coming from miles and miles away because of all the lights. We passed this one near St. Kitts at 4:00 AM.

As we got close to land the brown boobies began circling the boat. They like to dive and grab the fish that jump out of the water when the boat goes by. We've seen them a bunch as we've sailed between islands, but they've never landed on our boat. These two hitched a ride for quite a while.

Unfortunately that meant once we stopped the deck needed a good scrub.

In the end the trip took us 25 hours.

The French islands are all in the Caribbean, but they don't really feel like Caribbean islands. Sint Maarten definitely has a more Caribbean vibe. It's also been a very long time since we've been in a country where they speak English and use the US dollar.

We were the only boat in our last anchorage in Guadeloupe for days.

Here we're surrounded by boats, mega yachts and nightlife. It's been a nice change from our last few months and we could certainly see hanging out here for a while.